Addisonrose

Wikipedia Assignment 2

According to the talk page of Back-formation, it is a Start-Class level article and is assigned the importance level of High-importance. The comments on this page mainly discuss wether or not some of the examples initially given were correct. One of the interesting issues presented on the talk page is the debate of if words like donate and isolate and execute were created via back-formation or if they already existed. The initial commenter made the point that the article was slightly confusing and needed to better explain the difference between spuriously supposed affixes IE -holic and legitimately supposed affixes IE -tion. Another person helped by saying that in many cases nouns and adjectives that were derived from the Latin past participle already existed as a word itself in English. A third commenter agreed with that statement as in Elizabethan times it was a rule that Latin verbs ending with /d/ or /t/ could not add -ed to then form a past participle. IE act would’ve been said "to act" and not “acted”. The second most interesting issues presented in this talk page is the issues of clarity between back-formation and clipping. The article initially didn’t distinguish the two terms as being completely unrelated, it instead made it seem as though a back-formation is a subcategory of clipping. The author of this comment then goes on to explain the differences in a much clearer way. This related to what we have learned in this class because we talked about both clippings and back-formations. In our text book they discuss some of the most historical back-formations including edit, surveil and burgle. Both the article and our textbook discuss the fact that at first back-formations sound odd to people but with time they are used more and become more accepted. The section on back-formations in our textbook is fairly short as is the actual back-formations article on wikipedia. One important thing that they mention in the article but not in our book is that one difference between back-formations and clippings is that back-formations often change the words class or meaning but clippings simply shorten the word without changing its class or meaning. I really felt this article paired with some of the things from our textbook would give readers a better understanding of what back-formations really are. The article would be enriched if it talked about how back-formations derive from words that are historically monomorphemic but end in similar sounds or sounds that are reminiscent of specific affixes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation